Backrooms arrives with a setup that sounds like it was built to keep viewers uneasy. Directed by 20-year-old YouTuber-turned-filmmaker Kane Parsons, the film follows Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, the owner of Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire, a furniture store in a 1990s strip mall. When Clark passes through a wall on the lower floor, he finds an underground labyrinth that looks like a bad dream someone forgot to wake up from.
The first impression is pure decay: yellow wallpapered walls, fluorescent lighting, and a maze that feels trapped in a loop. The Canberra Times described Backrooms as a fitfully unsettling nightmare, and that tracks with the film’s strongest image, a place soaked in dread and rot. The review also said the movie never convincingly builds beyond its creepy, dated-decor premise, even when Clark later tries to explain what he has found by saying it looks like it was made by a bunch of construction workers on acid.
That gap between idea and payoff matters because Backrooms is not just any horror film. It grew out of an anonymous 4chan creepypasta post in 2019, then spread online through Parsons’ YouTube series under the name Kane Pixels, where he expanded the concept with a found footage approach. A24 then greenlit the feature, turning an internet myth into a studio release. That path gives the film a built-in audience and a hard task: it has to deliver something more than the shiver of recognition that comes from seeing a meme made flesh.
Parsons, who is only 20, leans hard into the oddness of the setting, and the movie keeps returning to that same sickly corridor logic. Osgood Perkins produced the film, with Will Soodik writing the script, and Renate Reinsve plays Mary Kline, Clark’s therapist. In one session, she tells him, “We all have our loops, our habits,” a line that fits the film’s interest in repetition and confinement even as it gestures toward something more psychological than the set pieces can always support.
That is where Backrooms becomes part of a wider horror trend. Its office-like spaces, uncanny interiors and stripped-down, liminal architecture put it in the same neighborhood as other recent genre stories that mine anxiety from places designed to feel ordinary. The problem is that ordinary spaces only stay frightening if the film can keep finding new ways to make them feel wrong. The Canberra Times’ judgment suggests Backrooms can do the first part. It never quite does the second.
So the answer to the backrooms movie rating question is plain: the movie is unsettling enough to linger, but not inventive enough to turn its premise into a fully satisfying feature. It leaves behind the image that started it all, along with the sense that the back hallways of the internet were easier to enter than they are to escape.
